One of my ancestors, or more precisely the younger brother of my great-great-great-grandmother is mentioned by name in this book. They solved the "problem" of Aborigines camping on their newly acquired farmsteads by giving the tribes sacks of poisoned flour. When I finally tracked down my birth mother, one of the many things I learned about my ancestors was that they were the first white people to settle in the "Northern Rivers" area. I am adopted, and a couple of years ago I set out to discover my "roots". And I also have a darker connection with the actual places and real peoples this book is about. The people I know are from tribal groups a little further south than those depicted in "Mullumbimby" but I can tell the dialogue is tape recorder accurate in both language and the (sometimes banal) topics of conversation (a lot more on "language" later). I have worked in the Indigenous health and Family support sector for over a decade so I know first hand just how accurate the depictions of life are in this book. I have a lot of personal baggage I bring to reading this so my rating for the book says more about me than the book's considerable merit. Sometimes the closer you are to something, the larger the differences seem. "Mullumbimby" is certainly a cleverly written authentic account of contemporary indigenous life and I really wanted to like it more. I found this one of the most challenging books I have read in a long while.
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